The Shape of Water (18 page)

“That will be very difficult, because I’m going away on holiday. I’ll be back Friday.”

 
 
The first three days spent with Livia at her house in Boccadasse made him forget Sicily almost entirely, thanks to a few nights of leaden, restorative sleep, with Livia in his arms.
Almost
entirely, though, because two or three times, by surprise, the smell, the speech, the things of his island picked him up and carried him weightless through the air, for a few seconds, back to Vigàta. And each time he was sure that Livia had noticed his momentary absence, his wavering, and she had looked at him without saying anything.

 
 
Thursday evening he got an entirely unexpected phone call from Fazio.

“Nothing important, chief. I just wanted to hear your voice and confirm that you’ll be back tomorrow.”

Montalbano was well aware that relations between the sergeant and Augello were not the easiest.

“Do you need comforting? Has that mean Augello been spanking your little behind?”

“He criticizes everything I do.”

“Be patient, I’ll be back tomorrow. Any news?”

“Yesterday they arrested the mayor and three town councillors. For graft and accepting bribes.”

“They finally succeeded.”

“Yeah, but don’t get your hopes too high, chief. They’re trying to copy the Milanese judges here, but Milan is very far away.”

“Anything else?”

“We found Gambardella, remember him? The guy who was shot at when he was trying to fill his tank? He wasn’t laid out in the countryside, but goat-tied in the trunk of his own car, which was later set on fire and completely burnt up.”

“If it was completely burnt up, how did you know Gambardella was goat-tied?”

“They used metal wire, chief.”

“See you tomorrow, Fazio.”

This time it wasn’t the smell and speech of his island that sucked him back there but the stupidity, the ferocity, the horror.

After making love, Livia fell silent for a while, then took his hand.

“What’s wrong? What did your sergeant tell you?”

“Nothing important, I assure you.”

“Then why are you suddenly so gloomy?”

Montalbano felt confirmed in his conviction: if there was one person in all the world to whom he could sing the whole High Mass, it was Livia. To the commissioner he’d sung only half the Mass, skipping some parts. He sat up in bed, fluffed up the pillow.

“Listen.”

 
 
He told her about the Pasture, about Luparello, about the affection a nephew of his, Giorgio, had for him, about how at some point this affection turned (degenerated?) into love, into passion, about the final tryst in the bachelor pad at Capo Massaria, about Luparello’s death and how young Giorgio, driven mad by the fear of scandal—not for himself but for his uncle’s image and memory—had dressed him back up as best he could, then dragged him to the car to drive him away and leave the body to be found somewhere else. . . . He told her about Giorgio’s despair when he realized that this fiction wouldn’t work, that everyone would see he was carrying a dead man in the car, about how he got the idea to put the neck brace he’d been wearing until that very day—and which he still had in the car—on the corpse, about how he had tried to hide the brace with a piece of black cloth, how he became suddenly afraid he might have an epileptic fit, which he suffered from, about how he had phoned Rizzo—Montalbano explained to her who the lawyer was—and how Rizzo had realized that this death, with a few arrangements, could be his lucky break.

He told her about Ingrid, about her husband Giacomo, about Dr. Cardamone, about the violence—he couldn’t think of a better word—to which the doctor customarily resorted with his daughter-in-law (“That’s disgusting,” Livia commented), about how Rizzo had suspicions as to their relationship and tried to implicate Ingrid, getting Cardamone but not himself to swallow the bait; he told her about Marilyn and his accomplice, about the phantasmagorical ride in the car, about the horrific pantomime acted out inside the parked car at the Pasture (Livia: “Excuse me a minute, I need a strong drink”). And when she returned, he told her still other sordid details—the necklace, the purse, the clothes—he told her about Giorgio’s heartrending despair when he saw the photographs, having understood Rizzo’s double betrayal, of him and of Luparello’s memory, which he had wanted to save at all costs.

“Wait a minute,” said Livia. “Is this Ingrid beautiful?”

“Very beautiful. And since I know exactly what you’re thinking, I’ll tell you even more: I destroyed all the false evidence against her.”

“That’s not like you,” she said resentfully.

“I did even worse things, just listen. Rizzo, who now had Cardamone in the palm of his hand, achieved his political objective, but he made a mistake: he underestimated Giorgio’s reaction. Giorgio’s an extremely beautiful boy.”

“Oh, come on! Him, too!” said Livia, trying to make light.

“But with a very fragile personality,” the inspector continued. “Riding the wave of his emotions, devastated, he ran to the house at Capo Massaria, grabbed Luparello’s pistol, tracked down Rizzo, beat him to a pulp, and shot him at the base of the skull.”

“Did you arrest him?”

“No, I just said I did worse than destroy evidence. You see, my colleagues in Montelusa think—and the hypothesis is not just hot air—that Rizzo was killed by the Mafia. And I never told them what I thought the truth was.”

“Why not?”

Montalbano didn’t answer, throwing his hands up in the air. Livia went into the bathroom, and the inspector heard the water running in the tub. A little later, after asking permission to enter, he found her still in the full tub, her chin resting on her raised knees.

“Did you know there was a pistol in that house?”

“Yes.”

“And you left it there?”

“Yes.”

“So you gave yourself a promotion, eh?” asked Livia after a long silence. “From inspector to god—a fourth-rate god, but still a god.”

 
 
After getting off the airplane, he headed straight for the airport café. He was in dire need of a real espresso after the vile, dark dishwater they had forced on him in flight. He heard someone calling him: it was Stefano Luparello.

“Where are you going, Mr. Luparello, back to Milan?”

“Yes, back to work. I’ve been away too long. I’m also going to look for a larger apartment; as soon as I find one, my mother will come live with me. I don’t want to leave her alone.”

“That’s a very good idea, even though she has her sister and nephew in Montelusa—”

The young man stiffened.

“So you don’t know?”

“Don’t know what?”

“Giorgio is dead.”

Montalbano put down his demitasse; the shock had made him spill the coffee.

“How did that happen?”

“Do you remember, the day of your departure I called you to find out if you’d heard from him?”

“Of course.”

“The following morning he still hadn’t returned, so I felt compelled to alert the police and carabinieri. They conducted some extremely superficial searches—I’m sorry, perhaps they were too busy investigating Rizzo’s murder. On Sunday afternoon a fisherman, from his boat, saw that a car had fallen onto the rocks, right below the San Filippo bend. Do you know the area? It’s just before Capo Massaria.”

“Yes, I know the place.”

“Well, the fisherman rowed in the direction of the car, saw that there was a body in the driver’s seat, and raced off to report it.”

“Did they manage to establish the cause of the accident?”

“Yes. My cousin, as you know, from the moment Father died, lived in a state of almost constant derangement: too many tranquilizers, too many sedatives. Instead of taking the curve, he continued straight—he was going very fast at that moment—and crashed through the little guard wall. He never got over my father’s death. He had a real passion for him. He loved him.”

He uttered the two words, “passion” and “love,” in a firm, precise tone, as if to eliminate, with crisp outlines, any possible blurring of their meaning. The voice over the loudspeaker called for passengers taking the Milan flight.

As soon as he was outside the airport parking lot, where he had left his car, Montalbano pressed the accelerator to the floor. He didn’t want to think about anything, only to concentrate on driving. After some sixty miles he stopped at the shore of an artificial lake, got out of the car, opened the trunk, took out the neck brace, threw it into the water, and waited for it to sink. Only then did he smile. He had wanted to act like a god; what Livia said was true. But that fourth-rate god, in his first and, he hoped, last experience, had guessed right.

 
 
To reach Vigàta he had no choice but to pass in front of the Montelusa police headquarters. And it was at that exact moment that his car decided suddenly to die on him. He got out and was about to go ask for help at the station when a policeman who knew him and had witnessed his useless maneuvers approached him. The officer lifted up the hood, fiddled around a bit, then closed it.

“That should do it. But you ought to have it looked at.”

Montalbano got back in the car, turned on the ignition, then bent over to pick up some newspapers that had fallen to the floor. When he sat back up, Anna was leaning into the open window.

“Anna, how are you?”

The girl didn’t answer; she simply glared at him.

“Well?”

“And you’re supposed to be an honest man?”

Montalbano realized she was referring to the night when she saw Ingrid lying half naked on his bed.

“No, I’m not,” he said. “But not for the reasons you think.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I believe it essential to state that this story was not taken from the crime news and does not involve any real events. It is, in short, to be ascribed entirely to my imagination. But since in recent years reality has seemed bent on surpassing the imagination, if not entirely abolishing it, there may be a few unpleasant coincidences of name and situation. As we know, however, one cannot be held responsible for the whims of chance.

NOTES

3
face worthy of a Lombroso diagram:
Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909) was an Italian physician and criminologist who theorized a relationship between criminal behavior and certain physical traits and anomalies, maintaining that such characteristics were due in part to degeneration and atavism. Lombroso’s theories were disproved in the early twentieth century by British researcher Charles Goring, who reported finding as many instances of Lombroso’s criminal physical traits among English university students as among English convicts.

11
The thought of going to the carabinieri . . . under the command of a Milanese lieutenant:
The Italian carabinieri are a national police force, bureaucratically separate from local police forces and actually a function of the military (like the Guardia Civil in Spain and the Gendarmes in France). Their officers are often not native to the regions they serve, and this geographic estrangement, coupled with the procedural separateness from the local police, has been known to create confusion in the execution of their duties. The carabinieri are frequently the butt of jokes, being commonly perceived as less than sharp-witted. This stereotype lurks wryly behind many of Inspector Montalbano’s dealings with them.

13
“phone the Montelusa department, have them send someone from the lab”:
Montelusa, in Camilleri’s imagined topography, is the capital of the province in which the smaller town of Vigàta is situated. In the Italian law-enforcement hierarchy, the
Questura
—the central police department of a major city or provincial capital—is at the top of the local chain of command and, as the procedural nucleus, has the forensic laboratory used by the police departments of the various satellite towns or, in the case of a large metropolis, of the various urban zones. The carabinieri use their own crime labs.

15
“what’s new in the chicken coop?”:
The name “Gallo” means “rooster” in Italian, and Galluzzo is a diminutive of same.

 
25
“Twenty million lire”:
At the time of this novel’s writing, about 13,500 dollars.

25
“two million
[
lire
]
”:
About 1,350 dollars.

 
30
Don Luigi Sturzo:
Luigi Sturzo (1871-1959) was a priest and founder of the Partito Popolare Italiano, a reform-oriented, Catholic coalition that became the Christian Democratic Party after the Second World War. Persecuted by the Fascist regime, Don Luigi took refuge in the United States and never sought public office.

 
31
Not even the earthquake unleashed . . . had touched him:
This is a reference to what came to be known as
Operazione mani pulite
(Operation Clean Hands), a campaign, led in the early 1990s by a handful of Milanese investigating magistrates, to uproot the corruption endemic in the Italian political system. Their efforts helped to bring about the collapse of the Christian Democratic and Socialist parties, but, as this and other such allusions in this novel indicate, the new code of ethics had trouble taking hold, especially in the South. Indeed the whole story of Luparello’s career is typical of the Christian Democratic politician reconstituted to conform to the new political landscape while remaining essentially unreconstructed.

32
billions of lire:
Millions of dollars.

 
40
“the prefect”:
In Italy, the
prefetti
are representatives of the central government, assigned each to one province. They are part of the national, not local, bureaucracy.

74
“fifty thousand lire”:
About thirty-three dollars, at the time this novel was written.